This Google Pixel Bug Could Leave You Hanging In An Emergency

The ability to quickly connect to emergency services, even without an active SIM card, is one of the most basic features on modern-day smartphones. However, for some strange reason, Google's Pixel smartphones — over successive generations — have faced an intermittent issue making emergency calls. The issue manifests in different ways. On some Pixel devices, 911 calls simply don't go through, while on other occasions, after the call does go through, all the caller can hear are garbled electronic voices, or the dialer throws error messages. One of the earliest incidents centered around this bug happened in 2021 and involved a person who attempted 17 calls using a Pixel 6 device, and each of those calls failed to connect.

After staying on the sidelines for several years, the dreaded Google Pixel 911 bug is back in the news again. A series of reports indicates that newer Pixel phones, including the Pixel 10, are also not immune to this issue. On October 24, 2025, a Reddit user on the Google Pixel subreddit described how their Pixel 9 Pro repeatedly displayed a prompt instructing them to "turn on Wi-Fi" and "turn off airplane mode" every time they tried to dial 911, despite being under full 5G and Wi-Fi coverage. After the Reddit thread went viral, other users reported the same issue, even prompting Canadian carrier Bell to also acknowledge the issue via their X handle. 

(1/2) Important: Customers with Google devices from the Pixel 7, 8, 9 and 10 families are experiencing difficulties contacting 9-1-1. We are actively engaged with Google to identify the cause and resolve this issue as quickly as possible.

— Bell Support (@Bell_Support) October 23, 2025

The carrier later added a follow-up tweet, in which they announced that the issue had been eventually fixed. Upon further research, we even came across a 2023 Reddit thread that carefully documented all reported Pixel emergency call failures. The notable thing here was that this bug wasn't limited to just one country (the U.S.), and was even reported from countries like Australia, Spain, and Japan.

Despite being an intermittent issue faced by successive generations of Pixel smartphones, Google has only publicly acknowledged this issue once. In 2021, after another user complained about being unable to call 911 for an ambulance, Google was able to verify the bug and identify that it presented itself only on Pixel devices with Microsoft Teams installed. A peculiar thing about the bug was that 911 calls were only blocked on devices on which users had not signed into Microsoft Teams. Understandably, Google's immediate fix for the issue was to tell affected users to either uninstall Microsoft Teams or simply sign in to the app.

However, more than four years after Google acknowledged that this 911 bug did exist, it is alarming to see newer Pixel phones continuing to encounter the same issue. Yes, you heard that right, the annoying thing about this 911 big is that it has consistently appeared across multiple generations of Pixel smartphones, ranging from the now old Pixel 6 series devices to the latest generation of Pixel 10 smartphones. Given that these phones have evolved over time to feature newer hardware, the real cause of this bug is most likely software-centered. However, it is concerning in itself that Google has still kept its users in the dark about such a crucial bug, and if it ever plans to bring a permanent fix to this annoying problem that just refuses to go away.